GreatEmerald

More updates

It’s been a really, really long time since the last update, but in this field, not all that much has happened, honestly. Although it still warrants a blog post, I feel.</p>

The past year was the first one in university for me. It was rather exhausting, as the studies are really demanding. But I got good results and learned a lot of interesting things there. Still, the intensity of the studies was one of the factors why progress on my projects has been fairly slow lately. Same thing with blog posts, too.

Although I made some time to perfect a utility I created when I was still in school, called "prepare for exams" (although it's in Lithuanian). You have to create a text file with questions and answers, and the program asks you the questions, then gives the answers. For each answer, you have to tell the program if you answered it correctly or not. If you did, the question is never asked again. If you didn't, then it gets asked again during the session. After it's done, a file containing incorrectly answered questions is generated, so that you could revise them later. It's written in D, of course. No plans to release it publicly since it's in Lithuanian, but available on request.

Talking of studying tools, mind maps are pretty cool. Helps a lot to remember systematics. Here's an example of what I had to learn for one test, and the chart really helped me since there was a pure systematics question there: http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/296/arthropoda.png

Talking about other updates, the last major thing was that I upgraded my PC. Namely the processor (which also pulled in a new motherboard and new RAM). It's really quite speedy, an Intel Core i5-3470. The new motherboard is also nice compared to the old one, since it boots really fast. To the point that there is no point in disabling the logo display, since it flashes so briefly it's impossible to read the POST information anyway. It does have some issues with the firmware, however, but hopefully it will be addressed in the future.

The additional RAM (8 GiB) is also nice for the times when I need to edit really huge videos. Though even that doesn't help when a program goes eating memory. For instance, just yesterday I had a situation when I wanted to convert a raw RGB video file (and those are huuuuge, a tens of GiB for a few minutes of recording), and I told FFmpeg to encode it in a fairly good quality format, too. The result was that the disk was incapable of reading at speeds required by FFmpeg, let alone writing the new data. So FFmpeg stored the data in memory until it was ready to be written, consuming all of it. So, in the end, best not to use raw video for things like that...

Otherwise, I'm still doing playthroughs on my YouTube channel. Currently doing Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World. I usually talk about any new developments there.